If Ukrainian native Anna Vital were to draw an infographic about her life, it would be climbing up a mountain with no summit in sight.
While she can’t see the top yet, Vital has already ascended astonishing heights.
Born in Kharkiv, the 29-year-old left Ukraine for the first time when she was 15 and went on an exchange program in the U.S. Then she got bachelor’s degree in linguistics in China and a J.D. degree in the U.S, working three years as a legal advisor in China and the U. S.
After Vital finished law school in California in 2011, she got acquainted with the dynamic startup environment of the San Francisco area.
It inspired her to leave her job in legal services and found her own startup, Funders and Founders, a company where she makes infographics about entrepreneurship and consults companies on their orders in information design.
Her work is often published in the Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, Business Insider, and VentureBeat. Entrepreneur Magazine selected her infographics for the top 10 best infographics of 2013 and 2014.
To draw infographics, it helps to have a background in design. The skills can be developed, though, by making visual analogies on how to structure information.
She says the secret of turning long complex texts into graphics lies in thinking literally.
“When I do this, I talk to myself like a 5-year-old. Make no assumptions. No question is too stupid,” Vital says. “I break the story into a list. This is important because even a great analogy has to have a solid structure.”
Anna Vital’s infographic “ How to never give up on becoming an entrepreneur” showcases seven phases an entrepeneur might have to go through before one finally reaches success.
She has a knack for it, to say the least, and part of it began in law school.
“I realized that it was much easier for me to look at the pictures explaining the law, rather than reading it. Infographics was the way to read a lot of meaning through less volume,” she said.
Enthusiasm is the top asset, however. “The next thing – put on your writer’s hat, learn to think and see like a visual writer,” Vital says.
Some of her infographics have been about startups.
“There was a lot of uncertainty about startups and how they get funding. So I started making infographics to help people understand entrepreneurship,” she says.
As for her own company, five other information designers from Ukraine, Malaysia and the U.S. contribute, she says.
In order to design infographics for a company, the first important thing is to understand the company’s product and audience.
Secondly, the data needs to be organized so that people easily understand it.
Vital says it is important to know how people perceive different colors, shapes, layouts and draw analogies between the story and visual elements.
The very last part is design itself.
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator are two computer programs Vital recommends as the easiest ones, where anyone can learn to create infographics.
“The best way to learn is to sit down and do infographics,” she says.
Information designers can make up to $120,000 in the Bay area, she said, if they have coding skills as well. “They might be called graphic designers, but information designers are the ones who do harder tasks like working with lots of statistics, analyzing data sets, writing scripts.”
She says any global tech companies like Google have data visualization departments.
“I started out thinking that my clients will be startups, but so far we have done infographics for the World Bank, a church, a hockey team and other diverse companies,” she says. “Once you get on the path you don’t want to turn away from, find something you enjoy, you know this is the best job you will ever have in your life.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe .
